Concerning the XPRIZE there is question I'm repeatedly have been thinking about - one of the criteria is the maximum number of passengers carried at one flight.

That seems to be requiring scalability of the number of seats. But for the XPRIZE only three seats are required. I didn't find much teams providing scalability - only two or three. May be, the others have to construct and produce new spacecrafts fit for the CUP.

Since I came up with the category I though I would offer a quick explanation (for now at least).

One of the goals of the XPC is to challenge the teams to continue working on their diverse types of vehicles. Yes only some can be scaled for many passengers and some teams will specifically compete for this category. Similarly teams will custom build their ships to win other categories like maximum altitude and therefore will only fly three people reducing the passenger mass.

We want lots of different teams to be inspired to trying new technologies and building their own concepts in this early stage. The last thing we want to do is limit our spaceship fleet to only one type of "shuttle" that wins only a few categories.

My final thought is that there will one day be the ultimate ship that wins in all categories and this vehicle will be mass produced to race against itself like in a NASCAR event where all the car frames are the same and only the engines differ slightly.

My drive for this category was to achieve putting as many people into space as possible to share my dream of floating freely looking down at our wonderful world below!

But within the period of the year the CUp is taking place there wouldn't be sufficient time to reconstruct a competing spacecraft to provide additional seats. So each team competing for the maximum number of passengers at one launch seems forced to provide scalability. But to win each team is required to be able to add quickly additional modules or seats after it has recognized the number of seats launched by the last team. That might be very difficult. There is the risk to produce too much modules or seats and not to be able to pay the cost of production.

Is the intention of the foundation an incentive to search for paying passengers? Or is there any other intention going beyond the competition for the CUP? That would assist the evolution of a private space activity branch.

You are correct about teams trying to rush in more seats, but if there are similar X PRIZE rules in effect then the passengers must be able to have sufficient space and air supply. And of coarse all passengers must return in good health and not with crushed bones.

The intentions of the foundation are right on the webpage and this is why I love working for them. They want to open the frontier to EVERYONE and give teams the opportunity to continue their work on suborbital vehicles.

It is important to know how many passengers are willing to pay and how much, but it is not the goal of the Foundation to search for these people, but rather to inspire them to become a part of the "New Race For Space".